I just wanted to get everyone's input on this:

How often, as a GM, should you have your Mr. Johnson screw over the players?

Sure, it's a staple in Shadowrunning games. Mr. Johnson will hire runners to go from point A to B and deliver package C. His real motive is to start a big ruckus where the runners are killed while he does . . . . something sneaky and evil (depends on his specific plan). But how often should a GM do that to players?

Additonally, I have had players who were SUPER vindictive and outright refused to take any more runs until the tracked down and killed that Mr. Johnson, even with no leads and no information.

Anyone deal with this? I have learned enough to only do it once or twice, but it seems like a great storytelling hook and/or great way to motivate the players. What are your thoughts?

I'd say no more than 5-10% of the time. And, if they wanna track him down and kill him, handle it like any other run, make them do legwork to get the necessary intel. Also, keep the consequences of their actions in mind.

It all depends. You can do it all the time if you are attempting to convince them them to steal cars for a living. The PCs could also learn to proactively knock out the Johnson at the meet, sell him to organlegers, sell his fancy suit, strip his car and loot his accounts. This is probably more profitable and safer than the run would have been.


Typically the Johnson has already convinced your fixer that he's worthwhile. Which eliminates a lot of the chaff, as the fixer doesn't get paid unless the Johnson is legit. The fixers do this stuff for a living, and they don't survive if they fuck up. Plus it's dangerous as all hell to screw with people who kill people for cash. So it should be very rare. And the players should have a good chance to spot something coming if they look.

Hey, I never said I did it all the time. But I DID say it was a great intro for a multi-session story arc. A run gets effed up and the PCs are left out in the cold, which could in turn lead to all sorts of government conspiracy runs or political intrigue. Mix it up a little.

All I am saying is, that when I am a player, do a run, get paid can get old after a while. True it's fun in the start, be eventually I crave a bigger interconnected plot. Maybe that's just me.

I guess what I am trying to ask here is how important and when is it important to do this? The first story of the core book shows about a company that double-crosses the runners and tries to set them up as the fall guys for genocide. Now, it is easy for me to see how that could lead to a series of runs trying to get to the bottom of everything. To me, that seems more fun than " Break into office A, then B, then warehouse C"

If the fixer is any good, they could tell the team: "This one is solid" or "This one might be dodgy". If it's a short no-brainer, the team might still consider taking it on. But, in the words of canon, nothing is as scary as, "It'll be easy!"

The short answer: As often as is fun for your players. Our group has a general understanding that too many screw-overs = My Foot + GM's Face(Velocity)

J's don't screw over players just for kicks. typically they would only do it to ensure they don't talk; knowing that if they fail, the PCs certainly WILL talk.

The notable times this has happened to my team, we survived, called our fixer, and he promptly said "I'll take care of it."

While we nursed our wounds, the Mr. J dies.

Moral of the story: have a good relationship with a fixer who doesn't like being lied to. (And has more powerful runners in his stable.)

Of COURSE. Any Johnson who screws over a player will, at the BARE minimum, be blackballed from ever Johnson-ing ever again, and will probably be screwed over by any parent organization(unless they planned it.)

Over the years (and multiple campaigns), I have had Johnsons backstab for a few reasons, but there was always a reason.

1)Johnson intentionally misdirects the players by setting them up for a firefight, drawing police to away from a scene where a second group of runners is doing something shifty.

2)Johnson tricks the PCs into smuggling her vampire brethren across the border, then tries to feed them to said brethren.

3)(Different GM did this one) Freaking AZTECH backed one of their elite squads (forget what they are called, Pumas or something) to lead us into a trap so they could exact revenge for us killing their partners. (Not OUR fault that they got in the way of us leaving!)

4(Yet another GM) Sends us into a crazy building filled with ghouls and insane mages in order to get us to the top (where we fight, not intending to, a crazy monster dude . . . spirit . . . thing.) I hated that one.


So yeah, it is used occasionally. Sometimes successfully, going down, where the players survive, and start coming up with a plan, and researching, and sometimes the players just bitch and moan and yell that I am being cheap.

In the 2 years I've been running my campaign the J backstabbed the players once and that was because of a misunderstanding...
In the 2 years the other guys been running his campaign, we get screwed over pretty much every other time...
Both campaigns are hella fun...
Both campaigns have a very different feel...

My last session ended up with the players backstabbing the Johnson at the exchange... though I'm not completely sure that the slight misrepresentation of the job (a vaccine turned out to be a virus) really warranted that, oh and during the exchange they pocketed the money and the samples and are planning to sell them to others now. I personally don't think its out of line to have the Johnson's backers hit the players to retrieve the samples now. Besides that they are probably going to pick up notarity from doing that. Anybody disagree? Other opinions?

It's a hard line to walk. Generally speaking, most Johnson's won't, since they may need runners again in the future. But betrayal is a huge part of the crime genre, so a lot of players / GMs half want/expect it.

My take is that betrayal is best done by contacts rather than Johnsons, or by people the runners meet and try to coerce in game. The exception being if you want to make a Johnson betrayal a focus of a campaign or set of runs. You can also occasionally set up situations in which the changing nature of things prompts the betrayal instead of it being assumed from the get-go.

It also tends to make runners paranoid when going to initial meets. Sure, it could be a trap, but generally I like that section of a run to go smoothly. Otherwise you spend half your time dealing with paranoids. Last year at Origins a Missions game (Brooklyn Bridge) was nearly ruined by a pair of players who insisted on doing this. We were two hours into it and we hadn't even gotten to the job offer yet. Ridiculous.

Point of notoriety no question. Sure, they did the right thing, but they did screw over the guy who gave them the job. Between the job itself (virus, which probably killed people) and screwing the Johnson a point is probably well deserved.

You could balance it out by giving them a bonus street cred ("did the job anyway" kind of deals) which would be half of what's needed to buy off the notoriety point.

I'd say that was reasonable. If I was GMing I'd also consider how the groups fixer would respond. He does not want to get a reputation for sending cowboys to do jobs so he might take sanctions against the group himself. His options might range from simply cutting them off and refusing to have any contact with them to sending one of his other groups after them to demonstrate how serious he is about dealing with loose cannons. It's also entirely possible that the Johnson's backers will go to the groups fixer and make it clear that it's his problem to sort out and that if he doesn't they'll take action against him as well.

Even if the group survive all the attention they may have difficulty getting good jobs in the future. After all no one wants to send untrustworthy runners on a simple job but they might be prepared to send them on a suicide mission.

Actually the group was contacted almost directly by the Johnson (one of the players has the Trust Fund quality that we changed slightly to reflect that he was injured (more or less lost most use of legs) and the corp actually is paying for some of the expenses) anyways it was originally more of a "I know what you are doing help me out (and get paid) or I'll squeal on you"... though as it turns out that they were a second group with no affiliation to the guys parent corp that wanted the virus for their own nefarious ends.

Anyways its important enough to them to send a team after the samples once they find where they are living (earlier in the campaign it took someone with a picture of the guy and his SIN ( they were at the mall) 24 hours to find his place so I figure that's a pretty good interval for today's game, when they try to get their property back and probably make an example of the team without killing them considering they did hold back when they ambushed the retrieval team and their Johnson.

I think the line highlighted in red above is the problem with too many betrayals. If a GM uses betrayals too often the group will be unnecessarily suspicious of every NPC. It also has the effect of a player vs GM mentality. Some may like that but I dont know how conducive that is to telling a story.

In my opinion Johnson betrayals (or any NPC betrayals) should be used sparingly. If overused it makes the impact of betrayal too routine.

Up to half of all runs may have objectives other than the stated one, which may involve some level of betrayal (a decoy can't work if security never knows it's there, for example), but a run that's a set-up to the level that the team is expected to fail or die is probably rarer.

A more important question is, how are you going to tell the difference between a screwjob and a job gone wrong through normal means, short of having someone gloat in front of the characters during the process? Admittedly there's always the kind of screw where there're big guns waiting at what's supposed to be the payment meet, but even if a 'runner believes he or she has been screwed, it'll be difficult to get enough evidence to get anyone else to believe them.

~J

There are usually pretty drastic 'coincidences' that can't really be explained - otherwise, the chance that the team simply succeeds where they should have failed is too big.

Evidence? Are you going to sue?

Look, it all boils down to creditibility/street cred/reputation/whatever. And the only ones needing to believe them are the ones that vouched for the Johnson.

Well, right. And in terms of credibility, 'Runners are the bottom of the heap; that's where the evidence comes in.

~J

No, actually, it depends entirely on their reputation - the thing that makes them trustworthy enough for the fixer to even give them a job.

After all, what's the point in giving somebody a job if you can't even trust their word? It's the only thing that you'll ever get from them - there is no written contract.

If you backstab, you get tossed out in the cold at the least (never able to work the shadows again) or dumped in a hole to match the hole in the back of your head at the worst.

That is just how things go. Shadowrunners are criminals who kill and steal for money. They are vetted by a Fixer who knows how they will perform and often also have some relationship with several Mr. Johnson's. They have to be at least mostly dependable and trustworthy to even get a decent run.

Hell, the runners are the least of your problem. The Fixer who slotted them for the job won't like getting lied to/screwed, all the other Fixers they work with won't like a screwing Mr. J or the fact that a team that earns them money got fucked, all the other Mr. J's who have a relationship with the runners (these guys get my jobs done quiet and well) won't like having a valuable asset messed with, and that is not even counting all their other contacts. On top of all that, there are lots of players out there who are very vindictive and will whack a Mr. J who screws them over bad. And you know what, it is not something I would even give them a point of Notoriety for, since by the laws of the street he deserved it.

The people most likely to hire runners and try to screw them are the first timers or stand-ins. The Mr. J's who do it for a living would ruin themselves, plus they know exactly what shadowrunners are capable of doing if you get on their bad side.

"Lets see, do I really want to screw these guys over, make it so I can't work anymore, end up on everyone's black list, and most likely have lots of people coming to kill me? Nope, sure don't!"

You trust that they want the money you're paying on completion. If there's a tight enough relationship for deeper trust, there's no longer deniability, which is the entire point for Shadowrunners instead of corporate death squads to begin with.

The Johnson who presents Ares' section of Corporate Download appears to have had a long career, keep in mind.

~J

Most of the time, there are enough interested parties that this just would mean they'll sell to the highest bidder - most likely not you.

You seem to misunderstand this meaning of 'trust' - it's basically the trust that they'll keep word.

Just looked it up - it doesn't quite mention how long he survived his job at Ares. On the contrary, the consensus (to chapter before ares) is that johnsons like this aren't keepers.

Well, you can argue how quickly he's been setting up jobs (but remember how few Shadowrunners there are at any one time!), but he's set up enough jobs that single-digit percent accuracy is meaningful. That is a large number of jobs. Also, Errant Knight, a personality that IIRC has been around as a Shadowrunner for a while, claims to have known him at Ares.

As for the meaning of "trust", that's pretty much what I mean. If people who would keep their word was desirable enough, corps would use in-house teams (and negotiations about how much is up front would be a lot less involved). SRComp includes a corp document that repeats several times that Shadowrunners are to be assumed to be not merely untrustworthy but actively hostile.

~J

The one from Fuchi that is outdated? Better check out CD (that you are referring to) and RC.

A lot of you seem to be putting an awful lot of faith in good ol' Mr. Fixer. Sure he's gonna vet his clients, but he's not some superman. If a company decides that they are going to pull off a run and screw the runners, then there isn't much that Mr. Fixer can do to stop it.

Let's say Aztech wants to have the runners shoot up a Renraku R&D facility, setting production back, and having the runners die in the process. They contact one of their Johnsons in the meat with comlinks off, tell him what they want him to do. Johnson hires a team, tells them to break into the factory and steal data. Aztech (not the Johnson) anonymously warns Renraku of the attempt. They relocate Mr. Johnson to Bora Bora and give him a new identity after he's done. WHAT COULD THE FIXER HAVE DONE? There is no evidence or information about the double-cross.

Just sayin' that there's only so much that a Fixer can do. Sure, he can vet a Johnson, but if there is a plan behind it then the fixer can be fooled.

This is a lot harder to do that you make it seem.

Ok, so they tell Renraku this. What is the source they use? The CEO going to call up the CEO? Ok, lets ignore that.

Now once they hear this there are two not mutually exclusive things that Renraku is going to want:
1) For it to not happen, and
2) To know who ordered it.

Having the runners walk into a trap (force 12 stunballs on 3, 2, 1) after which the captured runners tell them all about the Fixer and Johnson seems unlikely to achieve Aztech's objective.

It's fairly easy to get a bunch of runnners you don't like killed, but it's much harder to do in a useful fashion.

So basically they burned the johnson and have to start anew for the next job... which is about the same thing that would happen if the runners get their revenge.

You have to do better than this - Renraku most likely receives hundreds of anonymous tips that someone will soon break into one some of their labs.

The problem with really screwing the runners is that it requires a lot of effort to make sure.

What you need to remember are two important concept called repeat business and world-of-mouth-advertising. We assume that shadowrunners' payment is not so great that they can retire after a single job. They have to continue working in the shadows for a very long time.

Independent businessmen, such as shadowrunners live and die on their reputations alone. If they betray, the flow of jobs will begin to slow down, eventually stopping altogether, simply because they have a reputation for betrayal and no one will risk using them. Likewise, a shadowrunner with a strong reputation for professionalism and competence will be able to command a higher price than a reputationless guy who is just breaking into the business can.

Consider, for example, ebay. You don't know ebay sellers, chances are that you'll never meet the ones you buy from, but they all have that reputation score that tells you how likely they are to screw you, and you can use that score to make informed decisions about who to buy from.

The same applies to Johnsons.

Even Vigore & Jarl were pretty honest about the the runs that they contract, despite the fact that they worked for Toth. Because it is hard for a Johnson to hire shadowrunners once the word gets around that they tend to betray their contractors.

Andm when we're on the subject of reputations, when was the last time that OJ had a date?

Plus once runners are well established, they are more disinclined to work for people they don't know unless the offer is for big bucks.

Think about it, you been running for a couple of years. You always try to get the job done, you don't screw over the people who hire you, and you act mostly professional. Not saying you don't have any quirks, but hey, most criminals (as well as soldiers and mercs) are going to have some issues.

You got 2 or 3 Fixers that know you well, what jobs your good at, that your dependable, and that you do good work. You also have a number of professional Mr. J's that you have worked for several times, lets say 6 or 7. On top of that you will have a broad web of contacts, several of which you have done a job or two for.

The Mr. J's who know you most likely aren't going to screw you, since it is their job to hire professional deniable assets to get criminal work done. Guess what, you might be a criminal but you have consistently pulled off the jobs that were passed down to him and onto you. That makes you an asset that allows him to do his job. You don't have to like each other, you don't have to trust each other completely, but there has to be some trust and understanding for the jobs to get done.

So, this runner would have lots of people he knows who need work done. Every so often there will be a slow time when none of his people have any jobs. That's when he is most likely to get screwed, taking a job from someone he doesn't know.


Of course, for a fresh runner just starting out with no history at all, all this goes out the window. He has to take the jobs that might go crazy or be screwy since he has no rep yet.

Personally, my players hold their fixers responsible for vouching for the Johnson's reliability (which makes many of the fixer NPCs in my game wary of giving them jobs with untested Johnson's.) The team itself (as a whole) is fairly reliable, thus they demand that their fixers set them up with at least tried and tested Johnsons.

In my experience, outright betrayers by Mr J are quite rare and should be big deals. Shadowrunners, even small time ones, are not to be trifled with. They are murderers and mercenaries, and live by their rep. If you try to backstab them, they will likely kill you if only to maintain their face.

However Mr. J screwing with the runners is more common. Giving false intel about the target, masking the purpose of fallout of a run, trying to welsh out of payment, these are the standard risks of working in the shadows.

It's a slippery slope for the runners as well. If a Johnson betrays you, you have to retaliate or else you are leaving yourself open to be abused by future Johnsons, but if you hunt down too many Johnsons, people will be reluctant to work with you.

I agree that a Johnson out-and-out betrayal should be a big deal - because players tend to be vindictive towards NPCs who screw with their characters. Their number one priority will be hunting down the Johnson, and if you just have the Johnson skip town without a trace, they are likely to sour on the rest of the game. Until the situation gets resolved, they really won't care about any potential love interests or other roleplaying hooks - they will just want revenge. So use backstabbing Johnsons sparingly, and be aware that the PCs will be strongly motivated towards revenge.

On the other hand, I also agree that Johnsons will more commonly be slightly misleading, or skimp a bit on the logistical support - hell, they might not be working on completely accurate information themselves.

As a player, I hate when it seems every Mr. Johnson that comes along is looking for patsies. The biggest tip-off is a pitttance up front and a huge payoff upon completion. Of course, Mr. Johnson never intends to make that final payment.

As someone previously mentioned, when this repeatedly happens, you look for other job opportunities that pay better. Which typically angers the GM and the group falls apart.

So my advice would be to use the doublecrossing Johnson plot infrequently. The only time I could see employing it frequently is when the players make a habit of doublecrossing others. Then it is kind of like they asked for it as the practice of doublecrossing everyone seems to fit their view of the SR universe.

I agree with the view that most betrayals will not be done by professional Johnsons, but amateurs - those who do it once, for the first time, or both. Usually, professional Johnsons do not need to betray their team - they know enough people who will steal that virus without having to dupe the one team that won't steal a virus into believing it's a vaccine. They also know teams that can be hired for decoy runs openly, and who will pull those off as planned - instead of somehow managing to pull off the run that was just meant as a decoy, and messing up the Johnson's plans.